I don’t care that the earth’s shadow eclipses the moon, said the Admiral. I have seen terrific irregularity with mine own eyes, and have been forced to the sensible conclusion that this earth is not round as some wrongly insist, but the shape of a pear or violin.

A thousand years before the Admiral made his daring proclamation and charted his course on this violin-shaped earth, people thought it was flat like a discus. Until the Greek Cartographer spoke out, claiming it was round like an orange. He’d drawn standard aesthetic divisions on his planisphere, a flattened version of his rounded earth. The first set of lines he called “latitude.” But his finest moment, his greatest act of self-control, had been to leave parts of his map blank. The Cartographer was later forgotten, his map lost like dreams that are lost upon waking, lingering only as faint unglimpsable residues. Seafarers, with no reliable guide by which to brave the open Ocean, paddled and were wind-scooted along the landlocked, salted waters. For navigation, they dead reckoned and used wind roses—radiating lines of sixteen focal points, ornate foliations that indicated air currents but varied according to the size and dimensions of the map, so that no two maps, even of one place, were ever alike. The Cartographer was eventually remembered, but by then the forgetting had been sustained so long that no one could read Greek. The epic after the Cartographer’s planisphere reigned and before it reigned again—forgotten and then discovered but unreadable—was known as the Great Interruption. It lasted one thousand years.

-From Rachel Kushner’s story “The Great Exception,” one of three short stories in the slim volume The Strange Case of Rachel K published by New Directions. In her introduction, Kushner writes that the story was the result of reading an “an enormous book on the history of so-called civilization, a work of seductive details (the Peruvians believed the world was a box with a ridged top, the Egyptians that it was an egg)…”

]]>http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/31/charting-the-world-in-a-single-short-story/feed/01024px-Fernão_Vaz_Dourado_1571-1and7kThe U.S., China and the ‘Financial Balance of Terror’http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/31/americas-allies-are-flocking-to-chinas-answer-to-the-world-bank/
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/31/americas-allies-are-flocking-to-chinas-answer-to-the-world-bank/#commentsTue, 31 Mar 2015 14:00:33 +0000http://blog.longreads.com/?p=15702]]>This month, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, South Korea, and a handful of other U.S. allies announced plans to join the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, despite American pressure not to. The multilateral fund is essentially China’s answer to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, organizations where the U.S. has long had more influence than China. China has the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves—around $3.8 trillion in December—and wants to use some to fund infrastructure development projects in Asia. It’s clear enormous investment there is necessary. It’s also clear the U.S. is concerned the AIIB—and other new China-backed lending institutions—will weaken its influence. Below is a bit of background from the December 2009 Foreign Policyexcerpt of Brad DeLong and Stephen Cohen’s prescient book The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money:

Proverbs 22:7 instructs us: “The borrower is servant to the lender.” But the lesson requires some exegesis to fit smoothly into context. The burden of the U.S. foreign debt may be better explained by the oft-repeated Wall Street wisecrack, which we repeat: When you owe the bank $1 million, the bank has got you; when you owe the bank $1 billion, you’ve got the bank.

Neither side can walk away; we’re locked. The debt binds China especially and other governments that have the money. Selling the debt would send the dollar way down and thereby destroy the value of their dollar holdings and severely damage their economies’ massive export-based sectors. Worse yet, sell it for what? Their “reserves” are so huge that there is nothing else they can hold them in, not at that scale. From a Chinese viewpoint, it’s exasperating.

The U.S.-China economic imbalance has forced the two powers into a very intimate and not very desired embrace, something Lawrence Summers once called a financial balance of terror. This is all to the good: The two powers must learn to work as partners, and not just in economic matters — global warming and global order also need positive Sino-American cooperation, and they are much more important long-term issues. Sino-American partnership, in managing the complex mess of their imbalanced economic codependency, can constitute a good beginning for managing the utterly unhinged problems of world balance and order. We have no acceptable choice but to get good at it, and that will take some doing on both sides.

As money alters power relations, the United States is not simply becoming dependent — but it is no longer independent, either. That is a major change. And China is no longer helpless and cowed in face of the superpower hegemon; it has got a grip on it. Indeed, while the world peeks in, the two countries are realizing that they have thrown themselves into an intimate economic embrace with, to say the least, very mixed feelings.

[Allison] Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page.

In the process, Jones has helped give rise to a new kind of American comedy. In 1999, she cast Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Jason Segel in the critically acclaimed, poorly watched teen series “Freaks and Geeks.” The show, created and written by Feig and produced by Apatow, was a coming-of-age story set in the suburban Michigan of Feig’s youth. Jones won the show’s only Emmy, for her casting. Several years later, she met with a young, sweaty Jonah Hill, who was desperate for an introduction to Apatow. She told Apatow that Hill was weird and hilarious. That sufficed; Apatow expanded a cameo part for Hill in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” as an odd but lovable eBay customer. Two years later, Hill was cast with Michael Cera in “Superbad,” a raunchy teen comedy that Apatow produced. It was left to Jones to find their nerdier-than-thou friend McLovin. Jones posted notices seeking high-school students in L.A. After seeing thousands of candidates, she caught a glimpse of a camera-phone head shot sent in by a sixteen-year-old named Christopher Mintz-Plasse. She called the director, Greg Mottola, and excitedly said, “I think I found McLovin; he’s like Dill from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ ” Jones told me, “You could tell he was a kid who probably had seen the inside of a locker.” Since then, Mintz-Plasse has starred in six movies.

Sigmund Freud called dreams ”the royal road to the unconscious” and theorized that they reflected highly individual unconscious wishes. His student Carl Jung, who later broke with him, thought the recurring use of enduring symbols in dreams, like mazes, mirrors and snakes, reflected something more collective and universal.

***

Many people interviewed said they dreamed about their childhood homes, especially if they were from neighborhoods that had changed radically over the years. ”It’s like a lost civilization,” said Professor Marcus of Columbia, who grew up in the Bronx and often dreams about it. And since living space might be described as the sex of the 90’s — everyone wants it and nobody can seem to get enough — it is fitting that such space was the subject of several city dwellers’ dreams.

Ten years ago, customers placing orders in the drive-through lane at McDonald’s would have their food in about two and a half minutes (or 152 seconds, if you want to get precise). Today, the same order takes a bit over three minutes (or 189.5 seconds) on average, according to analyst research from Janney Montgomery Scott. While a half-minute extra might not seem like a lot, it represents lost customers and revenue at a company that can ill afford to lose either.

When Richard Adams owned a string of McDonald’s franchises in Southern California, he liked to sit outside and do paperwork. It gave him great insight into the business, he said, and how all those seconds add up.

“My magic number was 13,” said Mr. Adams, who now has a consulting firm. “Once 13 cars had lined up in the drive-through, all the other cars would turn around and drive away. There was a point where people just wouldn’t wait. McDonald’s has ignored this problem for a long time.”

The longer wait times are primarily the result of efforts to make McDonald’s more varied and relevant in a premium, fast-casual world. And perhaps nothing exemplifies this problem better than the Premium McWrap.

The problem of wage theft is not confined to any one industry, ethnicity, size of business, or corporate structure, says Labor Commissioner Julie Su. Each year, California loses approximately $8 billion in tax revenues to wage theft, and Su’s office has investigated millions of dollars’ worth of violations committed by, among others, a hospital, assisted living providers, and a construction project. But restaurants in Chinatown are particularly egregious offenders: A 2010 report by the CPA found that half of Chinatown restaurant workers have had their wages undercut, payments withheld, or tips stolen. A survey of low-wage workers in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, performed by the National Employment Labor Project, reveals that close to 85 percent of foreign-born Asians, 78.8 percent of women, and nearly 85 percent of undocumented workers have experienced overtime violations.

Among the most likely victims of wage theft are nonunion workers, people who don’t speak English, and immigrants who lack an understanding of their rights. Not all of the workers involved in the Yank Sing campaign fell into these categories, but many still felt vulnerable. If they went public too soon, if they picketed the sidewalk or stormed the dining room or publicized their story in the media, they risked turning management against them and losing their livelihood— and many of them wanted to keep working for Yank Sing. Their situation was unusual: According to Kao of the Asian Law Caucus, three-quarters of the wage claims received by the organization’s free legal clinic in San Francisco are filed by workers who have already left their job. People who are still employed, notes Victor Narro, project director at the UCLA Labor Center, typically don’t risk such actions without the protection of a union contract.

]]>http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/29/why-certain-workers-are-more-vulnerable-to-wage-theft/feed/06068537720_f37ab83e81_bjuliawickYes Means Yes, So What’s the Catch? A Reading List About Consenthttp://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/29/yes-means-yes-so-whats-the-catch-a-reading-list-about-consent/
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/29/yes-means-yes-so-whats-the-catch-a-reading-list-about-consent/#commentsSun, 29 Mar 2015 17:00:44 +0000http://blog.longreads.com/?p=15774newsletter, where she recently shared a link to an article she wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine. Friedman visited the University of California at Santa Barbara and interviewed twenty-something students about their sexual habits and desires—specifically if they'd been affected by the "Yes Means Yes" law, SB 967, which demands enthusiastic consent from all parties throughout a sexual encounter.]]>I subscribe to writer Ann Friedman’s fabulous newsletter, where she recently shared a link to an article she wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine. Friedman visited the University of California at Santa Barbara and interviewed twenty-something students about their sexual habits and desires—specifically if they’d been affected by the “Yes Means Yes” law, SB 967, which demands enthusiastic consent from all parties throughout a sexual encounter.

I’d heard of SB 967, but I hadn’t done any real research about it. Unsurprisingly, I discovered a variety of reactions. Some feminists welcome the bill wholeheartedly, while others are trepidatious about its limitations and do not think it does enough to protect victims and their advocates.

Everyone gets up to do another round of shots, and I talk to Aliyah and Charles, a couple who’ve been together four years. I ask them if they’ve ever worried their partner is too drunk to say yes to sex. “We just had a threesome with a girl,” Aliyah says. “She was kind of drunk, but I asked her 10 times over, ‘Is this OK?'”

“Can she give consent when she’s drunk?” Charles asks. They stare at me expectantly. I tell them that, essentially, the law says if you’re “incapacitated,” you’re too drunk to consent to sex.

Galtz has two main problems with the “Yes Means Yes” bill. One, it continues to prioritize the legitimacy of faulty, biased campus legal systems. Two, it should extend further than college campuses–sexual assault extends beyond the ivory towers, and college students should be prepared to engage with their local communities about consent and its legal ramifications.

Part of SB 967 is its encouragement of bystander intervention: If you see something, say–or do–something. I can see why this approach would be welcomed on college campuses–the college environment is supposed to be one of unity, to close ranks against those who would detract from its good standing. But Elk and Devereaux make compelling points in their argument against bystander intervention. Often these instances lead to more violence, this time against the intervener and the original victim of sexual assault. And bystander intervention, they claim, is only a Band-Aid on the gaping, ugly wound of a society that perpetrates sexual violence from the cradle to the grave.

]]>http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/29/yes-means-yes-so-whats-the-catch-a-reading-list-about-consent/feed/07161519601_672df277a5_kemilyperper‘Shutting People Out Is an Important Part of Being a Shut-In.’http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/27/shutting-people-out-is-an-important-part-of-being-a-shut-in/
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/27/shutting-people-out-is-an-important-part-of-being-a-shut-in/#commentsFri, 27 Mar 2015 20:00:20 +0000http://blog.longreads.com/?p=15729]]>

With Alfred, you no longer have to open the door for the Instacart delivery: A worker comes into your apartment and stocks food in your fridge. You don’t hand off your dirty undies to a Washio messenger; Alfred puts the laundered undies in the drawer. This all happens by paying your Alfred $99 a month, plus the goods and services at reduced cost through Alfred’s hookups. Alfred won first place in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference last year.

Shutting people out is an important part of being a shut-in: When signing up, customers can choose the option of not seeing their Alfred, who will come in when they’re at work. Alfred’s messaging is aimed at sweeping aside any middle-class shame.

“We’re trying to remove the taboo and the guilt that you should have to do it,” says Alfred’s CEO Marcela Sapone over the phone. “We’re empowering you to let others do it for you. You’re the manager of your life. It’s against the stigma of ‘People use this because they’re lazy.’ Absolutely not. They’re using this because they’re extremely busy.”

—Lauren Smiley, in an essay for Matter about the “sharing economy,” where anything and everything is now deliverable with a single click. Smiley sees the on-demand economy as less about sharing and more about serving, creating a world where one is either “pampered, isolated royalty,” or a “21st century servant.”

]]>http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/27/shutting-people-out-is-an-important-part-of-being-a-shut-in/feed/0facade-643537juliawickThe Top 5 Longreads of the Weekhttp://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/27/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-61/
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/03/27/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-61/#commentsFri, 27 Mar 2015 19:00:42 +0000http://blog.longreads.com/?p=15726]]>Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

It is now quite understandable why, as I already said earlier, my first question on entering prison was how to behave, on what footing to put myself wit these people. I sensed beforehand that I would often have such clashes with them as now, at work. But, despite any such clashes, I decided not to change my plan of action, which I had already partly thought out at the time; I knew it was right. Namely; I decided that I must behave as simply and independently as possible, by no means to betray any any effort to get closer with them; but not to reject them if they themselves wished to get closer. By no means to fear their threats and hatred and, as far as possible, to pretend I did not notice it. By no means to side with them on certain points, and not to cater to some of their habits and customs—in short, not to invite myself into their full friendship. I realized at first glance that they would be the first to despise me for it. However, by their way of thinking (and I later learned this for certain), I still had to maintain and even show respect for my noble origin before them, that is, to pamper myself, put on airs, disdain them, turn up my nose at everything, and keep my hands clean. That was precisely how they understood a nobleman to be. Naturally, they would abuse me for it, but deep down they would still respect me. Such a role was not for me; I had never been a nobleman according to their notions but instead I promised myself never to belittle my education or my way of thinking before them by any concession. If, to please them, I were to start fawning on them, agreeing with them, being familiar with them, entering into their various “qualities” in order to gain their sympathy—they would at once assume I was doing it out of fear and cowardice, and would treat me with contempt.

-From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Notes from A Dead House, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of his time in a prison camp for participating in a utopian socialist discussion group. Often translated as The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky’s account is considered the first book to expose life inside Russia’s penal system. In order to get Notes from a Dead House published he reframed his experience as a political prisoner as that of a common-law criminal.